Nicholas Sparks Quotes

People don't alter. They may with enormous difficulty modify themselves, but they never really change.

Man cannot be transformed from bad to good overnight.

It took me years to learn that character is fate and that no one can be made over.

Life isn’t like the movies. People don’t change overnight. people don’t go from arrogant and self-righteous to ashamed and remorseful. They don’t suddenly give in when they’ve spent years taking out. No doesn’t magically become a Yes.

It is not by spectacular achievements that man can be transformed, but by will.

God desires to change us from the inside out. Renewing our minds, starving our self-destructive tendencies, and teaching us to form new habits.

Repentance may begin instantly, but reformation often requires a sphere of years.

Evolution is fascinating to watch. To me it is the most interesting when one can observe the evolution of a single man.

Praise makes good men better and bad men worse.

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also - if this isn't too grand a word - our tragedy.

We renovate the heart by, of course, changing it, but we can't do that, really, without changing the other essential parts of the human personality.

As a character, it's very interesting to play someone who wants to change their life and have him change it.

We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.

Good habits are hard to develop but easy to live with; bad habits are easy to develop but hard to live with. The habits you have and the habits that have you will determine almost everything you achieve or fail to achieve.

Character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

By acting as you wish yourself to be, in due course you will become as you act.

The only way to change the world is to change the main character of our story - the one we believe that we are. If we change the main character, if we respect ourselves, then just like magic, all the secondary characters will change. We can only give what we have, and if we don't respect ourselves, how can we respect others?

There is always the possibility that people will change. Real change is more rare. You are who you are at a certain age in life you are pretty much a variation of that your whole life. It's conceivable that you will change but it's not likely.

We usually focus on what we're doing or where we're going, but God's primary concern is who we're becoming in the process.

If you're going to change a habit, you must BE the treatment.

Suffering is nature's way of indicating a mistaken attitude or way of behavior, and to the nonegocentric person every moment of suffering is the opportunity for growth. People should rejoice in suffering, strange as it sounds, for this is a sign of the availability of energy to transform their characters.

These various habits of thought, or habitual expressions of life, are all phases of the single life sequence of the individual; therefore a habit formed in response to a given stimulus will necessarily affect the character of the response made to other stimuli. A modification of human nature at any one point is a modification of human nature as a whole.

One of the most difficult things is not to change society - but to change yourself.

Never say any man is hopeless, because he only represents a character, a bundle of habits, which can be checked by new and better ones. Character is repeated habits, and repeated habits alone can reform character.

Sometimes men change for the better. Sometimes men change for the worse. And often, very often, given time and opportunity . . .’ He waved his flask around for a moment, then shrugged. ‘They change back.